The invention disclosed herein relates generally to data storage systems in computer networks and, more particularly, to improvements in administering data on storage media by providing the capability of selectively deleting stored data.
There are many different computing architectures for storing electronic data. Individual computers typically store electronic data in volatile storage devices such as Random Access Memory (RAM) and one or more nonvolatile storage devices such as hard drives, tape drives, or optical disks, that form a part of or are directly connectable to the individual computer. In a network of computers such as a Local Area Network (LAN) or a Wide Area Network (WAN), storage of electronic data is typically accomplished via servers or stand-alone storage devices accessible via the network. These individual network storage devices may be networkable tape drives, optical libraries, Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), CD-ROM jukeboxes, and other devices.
Storage media used for storing electronic data in such computing architectures include, for example, tapes, hard drives, disks, optical disks and other storage media. In some storage operations performed by a system, data is written to storage media, which is stored in a storage device in the system. Often, there is no logic associated with selecting a particular piece of media that is appropriate for the storage operation. In addition, there is no post storage operation check to determine remaining media capacity. Thus, there are storage systems which maintain storage devices containing media that is not entirely filled with data, which results in the system having to utilize more storage media than is necessary to accommodate its data storage requirements.
Another problem with existing storage systems, is that data stored to storage media may include more than one data file. Currently, to remove, or otherwise delete data files from storage media, all files stored to the storage media must be deleted. There is therefore a need to remove one or more selected stored files from the storage media, while retaining some of the non-selected stored files, without removing all of the data stored on the storage media. This results in storage systems maintaining data files on storage media that are no longer needed, and precludes the ability to delete certain files, for example, when a certain data type is no longer needed to be stored.